Preacher's Boy (14 page)

She was determined, so I said we should take the path to Webster's pasture. That way we could make it down without losing our way in the dark. My head was as heavy as my feet. "Wait up," I called to Vile, who was bouncing ahead of me despite the night closing in. "You'll miss the path at that rate." She waited for me to catch up.

"I know it's bad for him, but I can't help wishing I'd brought that wine."

"Don't even think of such a thing!" The girl had no sense sometimes. "It's like poison to him."

"I know," she said sadly. "But at first he's happy. I like to see him happy."

"Just don't forget afterward, when he gets mean and stupid. Just keep that picture in your head."

She left me again and moments later tripped over a root or something, pitching forward. I pulled her to her feet. "Not so fast, Vile. You can't even see your feet. You'll just get hurt if you try to run."

She stayed close after that. There was only the fingernail of a moon, and it was not much use. I was grateful for the well-worn path.

It was about then that I saw the bobbing light. I put my hand on Vile's shoulder. We stopped dead and listened. Somebody was coming our way.

"Who can that be?" Vile whispered.

"Shh," I said. "I don't know." But in my heart I did know. Somehow, while we were running up and down the hill, prayer meeting had come and gone. The light was Pa, come looking for me. Part of me wanted to rush right for that light and throw myself into his arms. But the other, baser part, held back. If he found me now, I'd have hardly given him more worry than Elliot.

"Do you think they're after Zeb?" she whispered anxiously.

"Maybe. Better cut off into the woods until they get by. We don't want them asking us questions."

"No."

Waiting silently in the woods, I could hear what sounded like at least two people heading past us up the hill. They weren't talking. Perhaps they were trying to be quiet. To surprise me. There was only one reason Pa would be climbing the path to the cabin. Willie, my loyal Willie, had betrayed me.

I stood there in the darkness watching the light come up. When it came even to where we stood, I looked away. I didn't want to take a chance of glimpsing Pa's face in the lantern light. We waited until their footsteps were well out of earshot, then found the path and made our way down the hill. At the edge of the woods we moved northward till we were on a line to the sheds. There was a single light pole in the midst of the shed area, the lantern on top
lit by gas, so we made for it. I longed to sneak into one of the sheds and spend the night, but Vile didn't stop. We took the route behind the sheds, staying off Main Street.

We snuck through the back yards of the houses between Depot Street and East Hill Road. Off East Hill Road is Prospect Street, where all the people in town who have the prospect of being rich build their houses. The Westons' is the biggest one up there.

I glanced up that direction a little nervously as we crossed East Hill Road, but I didn't have time to worry overmuch about the Westons coming after me. Vile was already grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the back of Wolcott's Drugstore. "Look!" she said. The back door had been battered in. "Hear that?"

Somebody or something was thrashing around inside. Once a poorly trained horse had broken out of the livery stable and galloped up the street through the open door of the meat market. It took half the town either yelling or grabbing to get it out of there. My first thought was that some such thing had happened again—this time in the drugstore. That's what all that crashing of glass and splintering of wood sounded like—a wild horse kicking and rearing at the display cases.

"It's Paw," Vile said. "He's got the blind crazies."

My first impulse, I'm ashamed to say, was to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. It wasn't altogether yeller-belly—more like common sense. Vile, of course, marched right across the broken-down door like Daniel into the lions' den.

"Vile! Don't be stupid!" She didn't even turn her head. So what could I do? I might have given up being a Christian, but I had not yet given up on being a man. I followed that foolish girl through the storage room into the store itself.

That horse from the livery stable had done less damage than Zeb was doing in Wolcott's Drugstore, a place usually as neat as your grandma's needle case. He was roaring about, thrashing his limbs every which way, taking an entire shelf of bottles down with a single sweep of his big arm.

"Paw!" Vile called to him. "Paw! It's all right. I'm here now. Take it easy. C'mon, Paw, calm yourself down. Please, Paw—" She went closer and closer to him, speaking as gentle as a farmer to a ranting bull.

At first he didn't seem to hear or see her, but when she was a foot or so away, he turned with a roar, grabbing her by her hair. It looked as though he was going to twirl her around his head like that poor chicken. I sprang at his legs, knocking us all to the floor.

Vile jumped up. "C'mon, Ed!" she cried out, heading for the back door. But I got up a little too slowly. Zeb reached out from where he lay and grabbed a bottle from the floor. Before I could move, he brought it crashing down on my head.

The blow stunned us both. I could see his eyes go wide as he dropped the broken-off neck. Then I felt the cold liquid from the bottle mixing with something warmer. My head began to spin. I swear I saw fireworks right there in Wolcott's Drugstore.

Vile was yanking at my arm. I stumbled across
Zeb's legs to my own wobbly feet. I was faintly aware that Zeb was not moving at all, just sitting there in the middle of the mess, looking stupid. I let Vile drag me outside the drugstore. She pulled me across the back yards and back toward the stone sheds. I was dizzy as a top, but somehow she kept me moving until we reached the nearest shed. As soon as she had managed to get me inside and close the door, I fainted dead away like Mabel Cramm on Decoration Day.

N
OW, WHAT FOLLOWS NEXT MOSTLY TOOK PLACE WHEN
I was not in my right mind, so I have pieced it together from a variety of sources, some more reliable than others. If you suspect that some of my own overwrought imagination has managed to slip in and dress up the naked facts, well, that's a risk you're going to have to take.

Someone, probably someone who lived in one of the houses on North Main Street, heard the commotion inside Wolcott's Drugstore. Since they were well aware that nobody should have been there at ten o'clock of an evening, well past the bedtime of any Christian citizen, they decided not to investigate on their own but to send somebody else all the way to Wolcott's house on the south end of Prospect Street to tell him to come down and see what was making such an infernal racket on his business premises at such an ungodly hour. Mr. Wolcott, being on the stout and elderly side, thought that it would be more
prudent to send his hired girl to go fetch the sheriff, who thought it wise to wake up two or three townsfolk and deputize them hastily. He didn't fancy marching into the ruckus and finding himself outnumbered.

At any rate, by the time the posse got there to investigate, what they found was a strange man of highly disreputable appearance snoring away on the drugstore floor surrounded by lots of glass and splintered wood, and a bit of blood. They thought at first that the blood was the vandal's own, but after they had got him on his feet and looked him over closely, they were forced to conclude that the man had no wounds to account for the blood on the floor. You can imagine the scene as the sheriff and his deputies hoisted Zeb to his feet and pretty much carried him to the town hall to lock him up—Zeb, bigger than any one of them, hollering and protesting and dragging his feet all the way down Main Street and up the town hall stairs and down the inside steps to the basement cage. The lock was rusty with disuse, the men exhausted. No one wanted to spend the night watching the prisoner, so the poor sheriff was forced to. He'd never bargained for a real crime when he'd run for office fifteen years before. It was hardly fair—a summons in the middle of the night, a repulsive stranger asleep amidst destruction, mysterious bloodstains—who did the town think they'd elected, anyway? That Sherlock Holmes feller?

Meantime the source of those mysterious bloodstains was lying out on the floor of the nearest stone shed, spurting rivers of scarlet. Vile tore off the hem of her none-too-clean dress, trying like crazy to stanch the flow. But to no avail. By this time half the town was
awake and in the streets, trying to find out what all the carrying-on was about.

Vile, now near desperate to save what she thought of as my rapidly expiring life, gave up mopping my skull and ran out onto Main Street, grabbed the first person she saw, and made him come back with her to where I lay. You'll think I am making up this part, but the man she seized upon was none other than Mr. Earl Weston.

It was a stroke of luck for me, I tell you. By the time he'd carried my near lifeless body all the way up West Hill Road and down School Street to the manse, he was covered with my blood and panting like a dying horse. Why, he felt like a hero of the Great War who's carried his wounded comrade to safety. He'd hardly walked that far since he started wearing long pants, and he'd never delivered a bleeding child to the arms of its distraught mother. Ma told him what a wonderful godsend he was, and he believed her. He couldn't hate me after that. It's hard to be too harsh on someone when you think God has personally chosen you to save his life. He wasn't going to spoil his run as local hero and angel of God by demanding a pound of flesh out of my behind once I was vertical again.

Mr. Weston laid me down on the daybed in the kitchen, and Dr. Blake was summoned. I have a vague recollection of Dr. Blake picking glass out of my scalp with a long pair of tweezers, but I kept fainting away, so I cannot tell you to this day if, when Pa got home and saw me lying there, he cried to know that I was found.

At first the news seemed good. Dr. Blake got the glass out and stitched up my scalp. My skull—as Beth had always suspected—being harder than ordinary, had
not been cracked by the blow. I was due for headaches for the next few days, Dr. Blake declared, but I was bound to recover. They hadn't reckoned on the infection. My fever zoomed so high that I was out of my head just as much as I would have been if my brain had been injured. All in all, I was hardly in this world for the next five days. Sometimes I knew someone, usually Ma, was wiping my forehead with a cool cloth or ladling broth into my mouth. Willie came by, but they wouldn't let him see me. What I remember best was Elliot leaning over me, patting me gently with a wet rag and singing softly, "Shall we gazur at da ri-ber?"

That, if nothing else, made me sure I was going to die. The idea of dying, regardless of whether or not I was one of the chosen gathering at the river, was just too awful. I decided then and there to fool them all and get well. That was the last time anybody had to sit by the daybed through the night to make sure I didn't die all alone.

As soon as I was pronounced to be in my right mind, I had a visit from the sheriff. He was very quiet and respectful, as is appropriate when one is addressing a person just returned from the banks of the River of Death. He apologized humbly, but he did have to ask me about the criminal currently locked up in the town hall jail. "Was he the one done this to you?" he asked, waving his hand at my bandaged head.

"Yessir," I said, weakly. It wouldn't have been polite to sound too robust under the circumstances.

"And this"—he produced a folded paper from his pocket, revealing my failed attempt to inaugurate my brilliant scheme—"is this your handwriting?"

I had to admit it was, though I felt ashamed to do so. What a childish idea it had been.

"Thank you, Robbie," he said, bobbing his head politely. "I won't trouble you further. You jest get all well now, you hear?"

"Thank you, sir," I said, my head still a bit muddled, wondering how the foolish ransom note had got mixed up in the affair.

I was soon to be enlightened. That night I was sleeping peacefully, fever-free and pretty much pain-free for the first time in days, only to be roughly awakened by someone shaking me furiously and a familiar hoarse whisper. "Ed, Ed, wake up. I got to talk to you."

There was Vile, one eye purple and green, leaning over the daybed. I must confess, in the closed air of the manse, the odor surrounding her was even more pungent than it seemed to be in the great outdoors.

"Vile," I said, trying to rouse up to my elbows. "What are you doing here?" In the dim light I could see her face fall.

"I know I got no right here, but where could I turn?" Her whisper was high-pitched and frantic. "They got Paw. They're hauling him down to Tyler tomorrow." She made a sound that I would have called a sob if anyone else had made it. "They—they're like to hang him."

"Don't worry, Vile. They don't hang people for busting up stores."

"It ain't the store, Ed. They got it in their heads he kidnapped you and then tried to murder you."

"Why would they think that?" You're asking yourself why a boy as smart as me could be so totally ignorant, but remember, I had had a head wound
and
a high
fever. My poor mind wasn't ticking as well as a cheap pocket watch about then.

"The runsum note," she said, her brow all furrowed. "Remember? Paw stuffed it in his pocket. They find the raspberry-juice note in his pocket. Then they find you with your head bashed in." She sighed. "It don't look too good. You can't hardly blame them."

"Oh," I said, easing myself to the pillow, remembering the sheriff's visit. Now to be perfectly honest, I knew that if the county judge decided to put Zeb in prison for the rest of his natural life, I would hardly be one to shed a teardrop, but hanging—even with my head like tapioca pudding, I could not rejoice to see any man on the gallows. It's not my fault. Pa has made me soft that way.

I guess my lying there not saying anything was making Vile nervous. She started sort of jumping from one foot to the other. "Ed,
please,
you got to do something. You know he didn't kidnap you."